Top strategy games on pc

Like an adaptation of the tabletop game crossed with the XCOM design template, BattleTech is a deep and complex turn-based game with an impressive campaign system. You control a group of mercenaries, trying to keep the books balanced and upgrading your suite of mechwarriors and battlemechs in the game's strategy layer. In battle, you target specific parts of enemy mechs, taking into account armor, angle, speed and the surrounding environment, then make difficult choices when the fight isn't going your way.

It can initially be overwhelming and it's undeniably a dense game, but if that's what you want from your strategy games or you love this universe, it's a great pick.

A beautifully designed, near-perfect slice of tactical mech action from the creators of FTL. Into the Breach challenges you to fend off waves of Vek monsters on eight-by-eight grids populated by tower blocks and a variety of sub objectives. Obviously you want to wipe out the Vek using mech-punches and artillery strikes, but much of the game is about using the impact of your blows to push enemies around the map and divert their attacks away from your precious buildings.

Civilian buildings provide power, which serves as a health bar for your campaign. Every time a civilian building takes a hit, you're a step closer to losing the war. Once your power is depleted your team travels back through time to try and save the world again.

It's challenging, bite-sized, and dynamic. As you unlock new types of mechs and mech upgrades you gain inventive new ways to toy with your enemies. The game cleverly uses scarcity of opportunity to force you into difficult dilemmas. At any one time you might have only six possible scan sites, while combat encounters are largely meted out by the game, but what you choose to do with this narrow range of options matters enormously.

You need to recruit new rookies; you need an engineer to build a comms facility that will let you contact more territories; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons. You can probably only have one. In Sid Meier described games as "a series of interesting decisions. The War of the Chosen expansion brings even more welcome if frantic changes, like the endlessly chatty titular enemies, memorable nemeses who pop up at different intervals during the campaign with random strengths and weaknesses.

Sneaky tactics doesn't come in a slicker package than Invisible Inc. It's a sexy cyberpunk espionage romp blessed with so much tension that you'll be sweating buckets as you slink through corporate strongholds and try very hard to not get caught. It's tricky, sometimes dauntingly so, but there's a chance you can fix your terrible mistakes by rewinding time, adding some welcome accessibility to the proceedings.

First, you manage stockpiles, and position missile sites, nuclear submarines and countermeasures in preparation for armageddon. This organisation phase is an interesting strategic challenge in itself, but DEFCON is at its most effective when the missiles fly. Blooming blast sites are matched with casualty numbers as city after city experiences obliteration. Once the dust has settled, victory is a mere technicality. Unity of Command was already the perfect entry point into the complex world of wargames, but Unity of Command 2 manages to maintain this while throwing in a host of new features.

It's a tactical puzzle, but a reactive one where you have the freedom to try lots of different solutions to its military conundrums. Not just a great place to start, it's simply a brilliant wargame. Hearts of Iron 4 is a grand strategy wargame hybrid, as comfortable with logistics and precise battle plans as it is with diplomacy and sandboxy weirdness.

Ostensibly game about World War 2, it lets you throw out history as soon as you want. Want to conquer the world as a communist UK? Go for it. Maybe Germany will be knocked out of the war early, leaving Italy to run things. You can even keep things going for as long as you want, leading to a WW2 that continues into the '50s or '60s. With expansions, it's fleshed out naval battles, espionage and other features so you have control over nearly every aspect of the war.

Normandy 44 takes the action back to World War 2 and tears France apart with its gargantuan battles. It's got explosive real-time fights, but with mind-boggling scale and additional complexities ranging from suppression mechanics to morale and shock tactics. The sequel, Steel Division 2 , brings with it some improvements, but unfortunately the singleplayer experience isn't really up to snuff.

In multiplayer, though, it's pretty great. And if the World War 2 setting isn't your cup of tea, the older Wargame series still represents some of the best of both RTS and wargaming, so they're absolutely worth taking for a spin.

We're always updating this list, and below are a few upcoming games that we're hoping we'll eventually be able to include. These are the strategy games we're most looking forward to, so check out what you should be keeping an eye on. There's also a dynamic turn-based campaign, where you can pretty much do everything that's possible in the RTS layer, whether that's dropping artillery strikes on enemy or sending engineers in to deactivate mines.

There's also an expanded destruction system that gives objects, whether they are buildings or foliage, different damage states, so you'll see buildings being slowly eroded and chipped away at before the finally collapse. Other new headline attractions include extremely customisable companies and detachments—you can add a medical detachment to a company and then summon a medical truck mid-battle—and full tactical pause.

It's not coming until , but you can take it for a spin earlier by signing up to Games2Gether, which will let you try out alpha and beta builds. The conclusion to Creative Assembly's Warhammer trilogy is coming this year, and it looks like it's going to be massive. The series has been gearing up for a big confrontation with the forces of Chaos, so Total War: Warhammer 3 will give us a quartet of daemonic armies to fight with, and a pretty different battlefield: the Realm of Chaos.

Kislev, Cathay and the Lands of the East will also be thrown into the mix, and Creative Assembly boasts that it will have an "unprecedented scale".

Expect big monsters, and a campaign that's twice the size of Warhammer 2's Eye of the Vortex campaign. Deserts of Kharak was fantastic, which is why you'll find it above, but who hasn't yearned for a true Homeworld sequel? Blackbird Interactive's Homeworld 3 will have 3D combat with massive scale battles that let you control everything from tiny interceptors to massive motherships, just like you'd expect, as well as moving Homeworld's saga forward.

The studio still hasn't revealed much about the sequel, though its broad vision is to capture how the original games looked and played—something it even managed to do with Deserts of Kharak, despite being a ground-based RTS—but with "meaningful improvements. It's still a long way off, though, with launch not expected until After years of working on its Endless series of games, the best of which you'll find on the list above, Amplitude has now turned its attention to a historical-themed 4X game.

Humankind is Amplitude's take on Civilization, featuring dynamic civilisations that are born from culture combos. You might start out playing as the Hittites in the first era, and then pick Romans later on, and then throw the Germans into the mix down the line.

With new eras come new cultures that you can add to the melting pot, unlocking new culture-specific benefits. It also expresses this through its cities, which grow throughout history, swallowing up the land around them. Some places will retain their historic attributes, like the older quarters of modern cities, while others areas will adapt as the eras progress.

You'll be able to start building your civilisation later this year. Some of our favourite strategy games have spawned enduring modding communities, keeping decade-old game alive with dramatic overhauls that continue to be updated long after the devs have moved on.

As well as celebrating the best strategy games, then, we also want to celebrate a few of our favourite strategy mods. Until Total War: Warhammer, we had to rely on mods to get our fantasy Total War kicks, but with mods as good as Third Age , that wasn't too much of a sacrifice. It's a Medieval 2 overhaul that recreates the third age of Middle-earth, including cities, landmarks and all the ents and orcs you could hope you fight or befriend.

Lord of the Rings has inspired countless mods, but this remains one of the best. The graphics might not wow you, but the fun and emergent strategies will keep you coming back. Late entry for the best strategy game of ! Fall Guys a strategy game? Why yes it is. Each stage takes strategy, skill, and a little luck to move on. Also it is an extremely family oriented game that people of all ages can play and have fun. A classic strategy title that has really improved the various ways you can play with the Gathering Storm expansion.

The AI can still be manipulated, but the empire building and fun is still top tier. The story and art are both very interesting and make you want to play more. Plenty of random events to keep the game interesting even on another run. The Heroic Legend of Eagarlnia still has some translation errors and typos, but the gameplay is fun and is a worthy addition to any strategy gamer's library. It is also being constantly updated. Incredible political simulator that has a developer who constantly works on updating the game.

You could run for school board district member in the most rural town in America or run for President. No results found. Showing 1 - 10 of 32 results. Set during China's titular Three Kingdoms period in the second and third century and based on the fourteenth century novel Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, this is the most dramatic and personal Total War game yet, making for some thrilling, real-time combat and some truly incredible stories.

For the most part, it's classic Total War. A large part of your time will be spent building towns, recruiting soldiers and moving your armies across a map of China as you try and unite your shattered land, but what sets Three Kingdoms apart is its intense focus on your individual clanspeople, giving each campaign a very human and emotional core from which to build your strategy from.

Never before have we felt so invested in our Total War soldiers, and victory has never tasted sweeter or defeat more gut-wrenching as a result.

Sure, it ends up leaning more toward the 'romance' side of history than the cold, hard factual take we're used to seeing from a Total War game, but for us, it's all the better for it.

If you're new to the series, Three Kingdoms is also the best place to start by a country mile, as both the campaign and its combat are easier to understand than ever before. Reinvigorating a sub-genre left dormant since the glory days of Commandos and Desperados, the German studio remind us of the pleasures of shuffling tiny murderers through dioramas, under the watchful - not to mention very green, and triangular - eyes of nervous bandits.

A couple of vital tweaks see the cowboy-flavoured variation win out over the ninja adventure: for starters, the ability to fully freeze the action and program in multiple character moves for grand coordinated takedowns.

While a key feature of Shadow Tactics, time continued there, making this the more surgical application. Achieve it without mind control darts and we salute you. By allowing the player to hand over the reigns of responsibility, Distant Worlds makes everything possible. It's space strategy on a grand scale that mimics the realities of rule better than almost any other game in existence. And it does that through the simple act of delegation.

Rather than insisting that you handle the build queues, ship designs and military actions throughout your potentially vast domain, Distant Worlds allows you to automate any part of the process.

If you'd like to sit back and watch, you can automate everything, from individual scout ships to colonisation and tourism. If you're military-minded, let the computer handle the economy and pop on your admiral's stripes. As well as allowing the game to operate on an absurd scale without demanding too much from the player in the way of micromanagement, Distant Worlds' automation also peels back the layers to reveal the working of the machine.

It's a space game with an enormous amount of possibilities and by allowing you to play with the cogs, it manages to convince that all of those possibilities work out just as they should.

Europa Universalis IV is far better now than it was at release. Over the years, Paradox had started to develop a reputation for launching games that required strong post-release support. Even though that's no longer the case and the internal development studio's teams are now in impeccable condition on day one, the strong post-release support continues.

Now it's in the form of free patches and paid-for expansions. The Europa series feels like the tent-pole at the centre of Paradox's grand strategy catalogue. Covering the period from to , it allows players to control almost any nation in the world, and then leaves them to create history. A huge amount of the appeal stems from the freedom — EU IV is a strategic sandbox, in which experimenting with alternate histories is just as if not more entertaining than attempting to pursue any kind of victory.

Not that there is such a thing as a hardcoded victory. Providing the player with freedom is just one part of the Paradox philosophy though. EU IV is also concerned with delivering a believable world, whether that's in terms of historical factors or convincing mechanics. With a host of excellent expansions and an enormous base game as its foundation, this IS one of the most credible and fascinating worlds in gaming.

A duck and a boar walk into a bar Of course, walking in anywhere is ill advised in Mutant Year Zero, a game that hinges on you sneaking through large playpens to choose your angle of attack or pick off stragglers to thin the horde before noisy turn-based tactics commence. How many games in this list can claim that? Watching expert players at work is bewildering, as the clicks per minute rise and the whole game falls into strange and sometimes unreadable patterns.

According to the StarCraft Wiki, a proficient player can perform approximately productive actions per minute. StarCraft II may be included here because it has perfected an art form that only a dedicated few can truly appreciate, but its campaigns contain a bold variety of missions, and bucket loads of enjoyably daft lore.

Though its dour single-player campaign is a big ol' nope in terms of storytelling, most recent expansion Legacy of the Void has an Archon mode that even offers two-player coop, so you can share all of those actions per minute with a chum. Technically, this game is more like an absolutely titanic piece of DLC for the original Total War: Warhammer than an actual sequel. While it has its own set of factions and its own campaign map, its true glory is arguably in its Mortal Empires campaign, which mashes together the maps and faction sets for both games for a beautifully bloated experience.

It would be worth the asking price for that alone. As well as adding a bewildering variety of fantastical unit types, from dragons to giant spiders and towering undead crabs yes, mate , Warhammers I and II fundamentally changed the dynamics of the battlefield from their historical stablemates. Hero units are of dramatic importance to armies, capable of holding their own against hundreds of bog-standard troops, while a robustly designed magic system allows for game-changing battlefield effects to be deployed, at the cost of yet more micromanagement.

At their worst, these remakes and remasters are simply the bones of games left long behind by the evolution of the strategy genre. AoE2 was the high water mark of the 2D, isometric-ish, gather-and-mangle format. It was superbly balanced, perfectly paced, and offered just the right mix of economic and military play. Definitive Edition, however, is more than just AoE2's glammed-up zombie.

It's a giant sexy Frankenstein, with the contents of five separate expansions four of which were originally made by extremely talented fans , and a whole castle full of brand new content, sewn onto the body of the original game and no, you're wrong: Frankenstein was the monster's name.

The scientist was called Microsoft. Oh, and they made it look utterly beautiful too, and added dozens of little UI and control improvements to circumvent annoyances such as having to manually reseed farms. With 35 civilisations to play as, single-player missions over 24 campaigns, more multiplayer maps than we can be arsed to count, and even a built-in training mode to get people up to speed for multiplayer, it's more than double the size of the original game, and hundreds of hours' worth of fun even before you start fighting other people.

If there had never been an AoE2, and this had been released out of nowhere in , it would have blown people's minds. Long live the age of king s. A few years ago, claiming that Mark of the Ninja was anything other than Klei's masterpiece would have been considered rude at best.

That the studio have created an even more inventive, intelligent and enjoyable game already seems preposterous, but Invisible, Inc. And, splendidly, Invisible, Inc. It's the kind of game where you throw your hands in the air at the start of a turn, convinced that all is lost, and map out a perfect plan ten minutes later.

The reinvention of the familiar sneaking and stealing genre as a game of turn-based tactics deserves a medal for outstanding bravery, and Invisible, Inc. Everything from the brief campaign structure to the heavily customizable play styles has been designed to encourage experimentation as well as creating the aforementioned tension.

This is a game which believes that information is power, and the screen will tell you everything you need to know to survive. The genius of Invisible, Inc. In the beginning, there was Total Annihilation. The beginning, in this instance, is , the year that Duke Nukem Forever went into production. Cavedog's RTS went large, weaving enormous sci-fi battles and base-building around a central Commander unit that is the mechanical heart of the player's army.

Supreme Commander followed ten years later. Total Annihilation designer Chris Taylor was at the helm for the spiritual successor and decided there was only one way to go.

Initially, it's the scale that impresses. Starting units are soon literally lost in the shadow of enormous spiderbots as orbital lasers chew the battlefield to pieces.

Spectacle alone wouldn't make Supreme Commander the greatest RTS ever released, however, and there's plenty of strategic depth behind the blockbuster bot battles. It's a game in which the best players form their own flexible end-goals rather than simply rushing to the top of the ladder. Yes, there's a drive toward bigger and better units, but the routes to victory are many - some involve amphibious tanks, others involve enormous experimental assault bots and their ghostly residual energy signatures.

Indeed, we recommend playing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance these days, which is a standalone expansion to the base game.

This adds loads of extra units, an entirely new faction, new maps and a new single-player campaign, and it's a better sequel than the actual sequel. It's easy to dismiss the value of incremental improvements. We're drawn to the flashy and the new, to innovations that light the touchpaper of change.

Civilisation VI isn't a huge leap forward for the series, but a step or two still make it the best one yet. The old draw is still there. You get to take a nation from conception to robot-aided world domination. Win the space race, infect the world with your culture. Pressgang the UN. Get nuked by Gandhi. It's a marriage of scope and personality that surpasses most game's attempts at either. Civ VI funnels that grand strategy through smaller milestones.

You might reach a new continent to boost research speed for a key technology, or focus on winning round a city-state with a few well placed envoys. City-planning matters more, thanks to specialised districts with adjacency bonuses.

It's pleasingly grounding - a way of chipping away at that layer of abstraction while adding another welcome layer of strategy. It refines ideas the series has been playing around with for decades. No one change is revolutionary, and nor is their cumulative impact. They still make it the best Civ by far, and Civ games are fantastic.

Paradox's first foray into galactic-scale 4X had a bit of a rocky start in life, but a slew of big updates and even bigger DLC expansions has seen Stellaris continue to evolve into something far more impressive, and most importantly more varied, than it once was.

Paradox often sticks with its games for the long-haul, as we've also seen with the likes of Crusader Kings II and Cities: Skylines, but so far it's Stellaris that has benefited most from this approach. Whole systems have been ripped out and replaced in the name of slicker and smarter galactic empire-building.

Its tussle of space civilizations is now vast and strange, all gene wars and synth rebellions alongside the more expected likes of imperialistic aliens, and it's a whole lot better set up for pacifistic play than it once was too. This empire has very much struck back. After Earth, the stars. The release of the disappointing Civilization: Beyond Earth has only served to improved Alpha Centauri's stock.

Charting the colonization of a new planet, Alpha Centauri is not only one of the greatest 4X strategy games in existence, it's also one of the greatest sci-fi games. No game before or since has managed to construct such a strong authored narrative that takes place between and behind the turn-by-turn systems at play.

It is a complete thing, and several grades above the usual space opera hokum. It could have been a re-skin - Civilization III in all but name - but Alpha Centauri radically rethinks the basic building blocks of 4X gaming, beginning with the planet itself. Discarding the idea of terrain types, Firaxis created a procedural system that mapped contours and climate to create believable hills and valleys, along with the water that flows across them.

As the game continues, seems that the process of colonising is a reversal of Civilization, in which fertile plains become industrial scars. You are creating a paradise rather than working one into destruction, or so it seems. Of course, that's not the whole story. There was already life on this 'new' planet, after all, and there's still life in Alpha Centauri and will be for decades to come.

While you'll spend time commanding troops and conquering territory, you'll also fret about the day to day life of the ruler you're controlling. You'll worry about the rival ambitions of your vassals, wonder whether your scornful wife is mad about the dirty dishes or outright plotting to kill you, and dread the charmless idiot your daughter just married.

The stakes of these family dramas are every bit as important as your southern front, because when your ruler does eventually collapse in the throne room, you'll assume control of their heir, and have to live on with all the consequences of your previous actions.

It's a grand strategy game whose systems create real stories, because they're about people rather than about flanking manoeuvres.

What's more, its refined interface makes it a much more enjoyable game to play than its predecessor. If you've not played a Crusader Kings game before then CK3 is where you should start. It's by no means a simple game, but the tutorial, tooltips and new layout will help you enormously.

If you have played a Crusader Kings game before, then you probably don't need us to tell you what's great about the series or which game you should play. If you're a seasoned Crusader Kings 2 player with a dozen expansions installed, then yes, you may be better served by remaining with the older game for a year or two more.

But when the time does come for you to move on, Crusader Kings 3 is a worthy heir. XCOM 2, together with its equally excellent expansion War Of The Chosen, is one of the finest strategy games of all time - and it's made all the more remarkable by how different it becomes when step up to that aforementioned expansion. Your best soldiers will not be merely skilled in the use of weapons - they will become The Avengers, capable of the most absurd feats of sci-fi heroism.

It is, admittedly, very, very silly, and attempts to maintain about nine different tones at once. That harlequin nature is at least part of the charm. Umpteen games offer the fantasy of being a roguish spaceship pilot, but a childhood spent watching Star Trek might leave you with different life goals.

A fantasy in which there are enemies on the view screen, fires in the engine room, and your survival is reliant on a mysterious alien passenger you picked up at the last planet you visited.

FTL revels in creating science fiction scenarios like this. It's a roguelike in which you control small spaceships and their crew from a top-down perspective.